In my first official teaching job I was a swimming teacher for kids aged 4-12 at a summer program in Japan. Terms like 'classroom management', 'student-centered learning' and 'collaborative learning' did not exist in my vocabulary, and 'flipping the class' meant doing somersaults underwater.
We held an interesting session last week on evidence around home-based care for older people.
Late last year I attended a fascinating session on Opening Government, pulled together by Beth Noveck with the MacArthur Foundation - and involving luminaries like Sandy Pentland, Yochai Benkler and Duncan Watts.
This weekend the Financial Times reported on the rise in private sector jobs in some of the regions of the North of England and the Midlands hardest hit by the financial crisis.
The Makers Movement is continuing to gather momentum. Its essential idea is that making things and manufacturing can be democratised with the help of a new generation of technologies, notably 3D printers. There's a message that we are more in touch with our world if we make parts of it rather than just being passive consumers. The movement is helpfully reconnecting craft to high technology.
Our new fund Nesta Impact Investments invests in UK social ventures which deliver both scalable social outcomes and sustainable financial returns. An area of particular interest for the fund is the use of technology to deliver impact: what we call 'Impact Tech' or 'Tech for Good'.
We hosted the Digital R&D Forum in Manchester yesterday with 300 people in attendance, and with introductory speeches from our partners, Alan Davey from the Arts Council and Rick Rylance from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
A few weeks ago a group of senior officials were gathered together for a day to discuss design. I'm very keen to improve government's ability to be creative and to innovate. So why did my heart sink a bit?
After months of evidence gathering and weeks of cogitation, the London School of Economics released the report of its Growth Commission yesterday. This is as close as you can get to the great and the good of British economics speaking ex cathedra - the author list is a role call of distinguished experts on economic growth, both academic and non-academic.
Today we've published a call for proposals for a major research and policy conference on social innovation, to be held in the UK in November 2013.
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